Reddit Say That Again Flat Earth
Are flat-earthers being serious?
Of all the conspiracy theories that litter the Internet, the flat Earth conspiracy is quite mayhap the most curious. After all, the ancient Greeks figured out the planet'southward shape (and even its circumference) in the third century B.C.
But a fringe society founded in the 1950s, defended to insisting that the World is flat, has given ascent to a modern footing of flat World adherents. These believers claim that the Earth is a apartment disc, and that bear witness that it is round — say, pictures taken from space — are an elaborate hoax involving multiple governments. Opinions differ on exactly how the flat Earth works, with believers concocting elaborate versions of physics and creative interpretations of the solar arrangement to make their theories work.
No one knows how many flat Earth believers are out there. According to Smithsonian Mag, membership in the Apartment Earth Society, founded in 1956, in one case reached 3,500 people. Today, the society claims more than than 500 members on its roster. But some believers want aught to do with the Flat Earth Gild, according to a 2019 CNN article, with some attendees of the Apartment World International Briefing in Dallas that year telling the news agency that the organization is a government-sponsored front designed to make Flat Earthers await bad. (The Flat Earth Social club responded to this by telling CNN, "We are not a regime-controlled trunk. We're an organization of Flat Earth theorists that long predates near of the FEIC newcomers to the scene.")
Who are flat-earthers?
As the Flat World Social club/Apartment Earth International Conference schism reveals, apartment-earthers are not a monolithic group. The current president of the Apartment Earth Society, Daniel Shenton, is a Londoner who at present lives in Hong Kong. Robbie Davidson, who organizes the annual Flat World International Conferences, is a Canadian who espouses a Biblical worldview and opposes what he calls "scientism."
A 2017 national poll by Public Policy Polling constitute that only 1% of Americans believed the Earth was flat, with an additional 6% saying they weren't sure. There was very petty evidence of differences in this belief by political affiliation, with any differences between Trump voters, Clinton voters and third-party voters falling within the poll's margin of mistake of 3.ii%.
A 2018 article in the Colorado Sun on a flat Earth convention in Denver found that many attendees believed a whole suite of conspiracy theories, such equally that all politicians are actors and that powerful shadowy forces control the world.
Apartment-earthers occasionally become a boost from celebrity believers. For instance, on Jan. 25, 2016, rapper-vocaliser Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. (known as B.o.B) released a track chosen "Flatline" in which he disses astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, later the two had a Twitter battle over the spherical-ness of the planet. B.o.B is convinced World is apartment. A day earlier, the rapper tweeted: "No matter how loftier in elevation you are... the horizon is ever eye level ... sorry cadets... I didn't wanna believe information technology either." In 2018, NBA player Kyrie Irving had to apologize subsequently causing a media controversy past speculating that the Earth was flat on a 2017 podcast.
Flat Earth map
The leading flat-earther theory holds that Earth is a disc with the Chill Circle in the center and Antarctica, a 150-pes-tall (45 meters) wall of ice, around the rim. NASA employees, they say, guard this ice wall to prevent people from climbing over and falling off the disc. (In keeping with their skepticism of NASA, known flat-earther conspiracy theorist Nathan Thompson approached a man he said was a NASA employee in a Starbucks in mid-May 2017. In a YouTube video of the exchange, Thompson, founder of the Official Flat Globe and Globe Word page, shouted that he had proof the World is flat — plainly proverb an astronaut drowning was that proof — and that NASA is "lying.")
Furthermore, World's gravity is an illusion, they say. Objects do not advance downwardly; instead, the disc of Globe accelerates upward at 32 feet per second squared (9.8 meters per second squared), driven up past a mysterious force called dark energy. Currently, at that place is disagreement among flat-earthers about whether or not Einstein's theory of relativity permits Earth to accelerate upwards indefinitely without the planet eventually surpassing the speed of light. (Einstein's laws patently nonetheless hold in this alternating version of reality.)
As for what lies underneath the disc of Earth, this is unknown, just most apartment-earthers believe it is composed of "rocks."
It'due south worth noting that all of the in a higher place is completely contentious even within the flat Earth customs. "None of us believe that we're a flying pancake in space," Davidson told CNN in the 2019 article. At the Apartment World International Conferences, it'south more common to believe that space merely does not exist at all and the disc of the Earth sits even so, he said. One speaker at the 2018 FEIC even argued that Earth is neither a sphere nor a disc, but instead is shaped similar a diamond, co-ordinate to The Guardian.
Do apartment-earthers think the moon is flat?
Flat Earth opinions about the moon vary. Some think that while Globe is flat, the moon and sun are spheres, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. In this vision of the solar system, Earth's solar day and night bicycle is explained past positing that the sun and moon are spheres measuring 32 miles (51 kilometers) that move in circles 3,000 miles (iv,828 km) above the plane of the World. (Stars, they say, motility in a plane iii,100 miles upwards.) Similar spotlights, these celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the planet over a 24-hour cycle. Flat-earthers believe there must also exist an invisible "antimoon" that obscures the moon during lunar eclipses.
On YouTube, there are videos pointing to shadows in pictures of the moon and arguing that the moon is transparent, and thus but a low-cal. I speaker at the 2018 conference attended by a Guardian reporter fabricated a example for the moon as a projection.
What is the Zetetic Method?
If apartment-earthers seem hard to dissuade based on standard scientific evidence, there's a reason for that: flat Earth theorizing follows from a style of thought called the "Zetetic Method." The Zetetic Method is an alternative to the scientific method, developed by a 19th-century flat-earther, in which sensory observations reign supreme.
"Broadly, the method places a lot of emphasis on reconciling empiricism and rationalism, and making logical deductions based on empirical data," Flat Earth Society vice president Michael Wilmore, an Irishman, told Live Scientific discipline in 2017.
In Zetetic astronomy, the perception that Earth is flat leads to the deduction that it must actually be flat; the antimoon, NASA conspiracy and all the balance are merely rationalizations for how that might work in practice.
Those details make the flat-earthers' theory so elaborately cool it sounds like a joke, but many of its supporters genuinely consider it a more than plausible model of astronomy than the i establish in textbooks. In short, they aren't kidding.
"The question of belief and sincerity is 1 that comes up a lot," Wilmore said. "If I had to gauge, I would probably say that at least some of our members see the Flat Earth Society and Flat Earth Theory equally a kind of epistemological do, whether equally a critique of the scientific method or as a kind of 'solipsism for beginners.' There are also probably some who thought the certificate would be kind of funny to have on their wall. That beingness said, I know many members personally, and I am fully convinced of their conventionalities."
Wilmore counts himself among the true believers. "My ain convictions are a result of philosophical introspection and a considerable body of information that I take personally observed, and which I am still compiling," he said.
Wilmore and the society's president Shenton both think the show for global warming is strong, despite much of this evidence coming from satellite data gathered by NASA, the kingpin of the "round Globe conspiracy." They also accept evolution and most other mainstream tenets of science. This is in dissimilarity to Davidson, who disputes other scientific theories and findings, such equally development, that contradict a strict interpretation of the Bible.
How nosotros know the Earth is NOT flat?
Despite the claims from flat-earthers, there are plenty of ways to know that the world is round. One quick option is to check out NASA's prototype library, which is chock-full of nice, curvy pictures of the world taken from the International Space Station. If NASA is hoaxing everyone, they're committed to the bit.
Don't trust NASA? The Russians besides snap pictures of the round Earth, Infinite.com reported. So does Nihon'south infinite agency. And China's.
For the flat-earther convinced that all these countries put aside their political tensions in social club to maintain the fiction of a spherical Globe, there are also ways to cheque on the planet'southward shape with 1's own eyes. 1 of the simplest is to go to a harbor and watch the ships depart. As a ship disappears over the horizon, the bottom of the ship volition become first, followed gradually by the mast.
Related: eight ways life would get weird on a apartment Globe
You can too take a page out of the ancient Greeks' book. Ancient Hellenistic philosophers figured out that the world had to exist a globe based on a few observations. One was that the stars aren't the same in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: From reverse halves of the World, you lot're clearly looking out at different quadrants of space. Some other was that World'south shadow on the moon's surface during lunar eclipses is curved.
The Greeks even figured out how to summate an approximate circumference of the Earth with no fancier tools than a stick and the light of the sun. Past measuring the angle of a shadow cast past the sunday at the same time and day in two cities a known distance apart, the philosopher Eratosthenes was able to calculate that the planet's circumference was betwixt 24,000 and almost 29,000 miles (38,600 and 46,670 kilometers). (It's actually 24,900 miles.) The very fact that the bending of the sunday differs on unlike parts of the planet indicates that we're all sitting on a earth.
Conspiracy theory psychology
As inconceivable as their belief system seems, it doesn't really surprise experts. Karen Douglas, a psychologist at the Academy of Kent in the United Kingdom who studies the psychology of conspiracy theories, says flat-earthers' beliefs cohere with those of other conspiracy theorists she has studied.
"It seems to me that these people do by and large believe that the Earth is flat. I'g not seeing anything that sounds as if they're simply putting that idea out in that location for whatsoever other reason," Douglas told Alive Science.
She said all conspiracy theories share a basic thrust: They present an alternative theory about an important issue or event, and construct an (often) vague explanation for why someone is covering up that "true" version of events. "One of the major points of appeal is that they explain a large event but frequently without going into details," she said. "A lot of the power lies in the fact that they are vague."
The self-assured way in which conspiracy theorists stick to their story imbues that story with special entreatment. Later all, flat-earthers are more adamant that the World is apartment than most people are that the World is round (probably considering the rest of u.s.a. experience we accept zilch to bear witness). "If you lot're faced with a minority viewpoint that is put along in an intelligent, seemingly well-informed style, and when the proponents don't deviate from these stiff opinions they have, they can be very influential. We call that minority influence," Douglas said.
In a study published online March v, 2014, in the American Journal of Political Science, Eric Oliver and Tom Wood, political scientists at the Academy of Chicago, found that about half of Americans endorse at least one conspiracy theory, from the notion that 9/11 was an within task to the JFK conspiracy. "Many people are willing to believe many ideas that are directly in contradiction to a dominant cultural narrative," Oliver told Live Science. He says conspiratorial belief stems from a human tendency to perceive unseen forces at work, known as magical thinking.
Notwithstanding, flat-earthers don't fit entirely snugly in this general picture show. Most conspiracy theorists adopt many fringe theories, even ones that contradict each other. Meanwhile, apartment-earthers' but hang-up is the shape of the Earth. "If they were like other conspiracy theorists, they should be exhibiting a tendency toward a lot of magical thinking, such as assertive in UFOs, ESP, ghosts the Devil, or other unseen, intentional forces," Oliver wrote in an email. "Information technology doesn't sound like they exercise, which makes them very anomalous relative to most Americans who believe in conspiracy theories."
Editor'due south Note: This article was commencement published on Oct. 26, 2012, and updated by Stephanie Pappas on Dec. xvi, 2021.
Originally published on Alive Science.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/24310-flat-earth-belief.html
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